#257 - Payman Taei, CEO of Visme - on growing a B2B SaaS business through virality

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to create anything and make it stand out. My guest is Payman Taei, Founder and CEO of VismePayman is an avid technologist. He loves new trends and tries to keep up with the ever-evolving internet. His background in Biology has led him to truly believe in the art of evolution. Everything changes in time. You either follow or create new trends or will be left behind. He started HindSite Interactive with a mere $170 to pay his way through College and over the last 16 years that followed he and his team worked with over 300 companies large and small from all walks of life. Frustrated with the lack of easy-to-use tools for non-designers to create compelling visual content, he went on to create Visme.Their belief: everyone should be able to create beautiful content with no design experience and minimal effort. Their mission: To empower the world to speak loudly by speaking visually.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Payman to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we can communicate value and ideas. Payman shares the big lessons learned in taking his business from scratch to profitability within 18 months. He also digs into some of the internal beliefs they had to eliminate that harmed even faster growth of the business. We discuss how they selected their sweetspot in the market and what it took to create remarkable traction. Here's one of his quotes:The bar has been raised today on what is expected of people and businesses. So when we say Speak Loudly, it means you can stand over the crowd. And by Speak Visually, you have the capacity to communicate visually and improve information retentionAs humans, we are used to seeing things visually, when you see a chart, you can remember and absorb that information much more than if you just saw it, as a set of numbers and stats that are nested on top of each other. We believe that every individual is a great storyteller, even if you think you're not. And so our platform has the means to allow them to be able to take their information and data and ideas and be able to bring them to the forefront in a more meaningful manner.During this interview, you will learn four things:How to rapidly grow market share and create defensible differentiation in a market that's always been dominated by very large vendors What to do differently to grow purely by word-of-mouthHow to structure your product strategy for impact when everyone can technically use your solution and all have feedbackWhy Payman decided not to raise external funding to grow the business - and why he'd start any new business bootstrapped again.For more information about the guest from this week:Payman TaeiWebsite Visme